You cannot create a website, neglect it and expect it to be profitable. Seems obvious but I have seen many commit this marketing sin. So what do you do?
# Content, content, content
If your local clothing shop has the exact same clothes year after year would you shop there? If Amazon never updated the products would you continue shopping there?
You see, a search engine views websites in the same way. If you never add new content, but all your competitors are, why should google rank you higher?
Unless your content is utterly brilliant, with thousands of people staying on your site for long periods of time reading the great content, you’re going to suffer.
I’ve been experimenting with this very site during the year. 99% of my business is word of mouth so I never really needed the site. At the beginning of the year if you were to type in “web design Torquay” you would have found me on page 10 to 12. I started this blog as an experiment for two reasons…
- I needed articles I could tweet about
- I needed content I could refer clients to regarding their questions
So now I’m on the first page of Google for the same search term. I add a new page each week and modify some of the content on the main website once every month or so.
TorbayFishing is even more successful… it is the top result for just about every conceivable search words and phrases I can think of, for both long tail searches and short phrases (Long tail is typing a question like ‘I need a beginners guide to fishing from the shore’. Short tail is short search terms like “fishing rigs’). That website achieved what it did by having really great content that visitors do stay to read.
Every time someone emailed me with a question I didn’t cover, I’d make sure I added that to the page… or created a new page for that question. I rarely get questions so I’m close to covering everything I, and they the visitor, can think of.
# Quality back links
The secret to success is not only new content, but quality content. Wikihow links to Torbay Fishing twice. That gave the site a HUGE boost on Google. It links to the site because I have content worthy of them linking to.
It is far, far better to have one big site linking to yours than dozens of low quality sites.
# Mobile Friendly
Google will soon be giving preference to it’s mobile search results, not the main search results.
This is a massive change and clear evidence as to where Google is heading. With the numbers of mobile surfers climbing ever higher, you cannot afford to ignore a single one of them!
# The Need for Speed
Following on from the one above, Google will also soon be giving preference to pages that load in under 3 seconds. This is again because their priority is shifting from desktop to mobile. If your website takes longer to load than a few seconds then you need to work on how to speed your website up.
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So there you go, a few tips on getting a better search engine ranking.
